Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke says he's considering banning Claude Code at Shopify because the tool refuses to natively read AGENTS.md, the cross-tool convention for giving AI coding agents project instructions. In a monorepo with thousands of developers, when one directory lacks the file format Claude Code expects (CLAUDE.md) while containing AGENTS.md for other tools, developers using Claude end up working without proper context, which Lütke calls a 'complexity tax.' Anthropic provides workarounds like importing AGENTS.md into CLAUDE.md or symlinks, but has closed GitHub feature requests for native recursive AGENTS.md support as 'not planned.' AGENTS.md was introduced by OpenAI in August 2025 and later handed to the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation; by December it was used by over 60,000 open-source projects.
Table of contents
The files telling AI agents how to workWhere AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md divergePlatform teams bear the costQuestions this post answers
Does Claude Code natively support AGENTS.md files?
No, Claude Code does not natively read AGENTS.md; it uses its own CLAUDE.md file for project instructions instead. Anthropic offers workarounds such as importing AGENTS.md content into a CLAUDE.md file or using symbolic links, but Anthropic has closed GitHub feature requests for native recursive AGENTS.md discovery as 'not planned,' despite requests dating back nearly a year. Teams juggling multiple AI coding agents can track compatibility gaps like this one on daily.dev.
What is AGENTS.md and which coding tools support it?
AGENTS.md is a convention introduced by OpenAI in August 2025 for giving AI coding agents project-specific instructions like build commands and coding conventions. By December 2025 it was used by more than 60,000 open-source projects, with support from Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, Jules, and VS Code. OpenAI later handed the format to the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation. Developers standardizing agent instructions across tools can follow format adoption news on daily.dev.
Why is Shopify's CEO considering banning Claude Code?
Tobi Lütke says he is considering banning Claude Code at Shopify because it does not read AGENTS.md or .agents/skills files, causing inconsistent instructions across Shopify's large monorepo. Since agent context files are applied recursively through the directory tree, any directory missing the right file format leaves a subset of developers working with what Lütke called a 'lobotomy,' forcing Shopify to build extra automation to compensate. Platform teams weighing AI agent tooling tradeoffs at scale can follow cases like this on daily.dev.